White Space

EMMA Outside of Time

“I BELIEVE YOU,” Rima said. She studied Lizzie’s crazy quilt, with its intricate stitchery, oddly shaped blocks of fabric, colorful glass beads, and dangling pendants. Her fingers skimmed a large orange tabby cat embroidered onto a trapezoid of green felt. “I don’t understand it all, but I believe you.” She paused, then added, “I think.”

“Well, I don’t.” Bode was leaning against the mantelpiece of a hearth in which orange-yellow flames crackled and danced. They were gathered in a front family room that Bode didn’t recall seeing in the house, and that Emma was pretty sure hadn’t been here at all, and certainly not this way—strewn with comfortable furniture, a fire already lit—until she and the others trooped down from Lizzie’s room.

“This, I believe in,” Bode said, rattling open a box of matches. Selecting one, he struck it. “Something I can touch and feel,” he said, as the flame gobbled up the match nearly to his fingertips. Wincing, he flipped what was left into the fireplace. “See, that hurt. That was real. So I’m real. I’ll believe in time travel before I believe this other extra-universe crap.”

“Multiverse.” From her perch on an ottoman near Lizzie, who was hunkered on the floor, Emma said, “So, forgetting what just happened to you guys, the reason you’re in Wisconsin instead of Wyoming—”

“You just said you don’t know where we are. Why can’t we be in Wyoming?”

“Whatever. How about the fact that you started the day in 1967 but ended it almost fifty years later? And this is because …?” When Bode didn’t reply, Emma said, “Feel free to jump in anytime.”

“Well, first off, I’m not saying I have all the answers. Second, I could say the same right back to you guys. Like, maybe you’re back in sixty-seven with me, see? It’s all in how you look at it.” Scowling, Bode scraped another match to life. “Real is real. This guy, Tony? Rima and Casey said he got chewed up and then blown to pieces. I saw Chad die. We all nearly got killed.”

“I didn’t say we weren’t real. I said that we—that is, the energy that’s us, our … essence? Our souls? Whatever you want to call it, I think the core of who we are and how we think of ourselves, might be in a different timeline or alternative universe, or even outside of regular time the way we know it.”

“See?” Bode waved a dismissive hand. “It’s all voodoo. You’re just guessing, and I don’t even understand what you just said. Our essence? Outside of time? And what timeline? What other universe? I’m here, it’s now, I’m real.”

“He’s got a point.” Casey lay on a sofa as Eric knelt alongside, gently finger-walking the patchwork of ugly bruises on his brother’s chest. “How does some weird theory explain … Ow.” Casey fired a glare at Eric. “That hurt.”

“Sorry, Case.” Eric made a face. “I think maybe two, three breaks? Or only cracks … I learned battlefield stuff, the basics, but I’m no medic.”

“It jab when you breathe?” When Casey nodded, Bode said, “Yeah, they’re probably broke. Not a whole bunch you can do, and they’ll heal up on their own okay. If they got tape in this place, I can show you how to splint them, maybe make you a little more comfortable. Duct tape’d be good.” Bode’s eyes drifted over to Lizzie. “I don’t suppose you’re smart enough to whip up a little first aid kit?”

“Don’t be such an asshole,” Emma said.

“I don’t know if there’s a kit, or … duck tape, whatever that is.” Lizzie’s arms tightened around her knees. “I’ve never needed any band-aids or iodine or stuff. Maybe there’s something in one of the bathrooms, or kitchen.”

“I’ll be okay.” Grimacing, Casey slid his arms into a faded denim shirt Eric had unearthed from an upstairs bedroom. “But I’m with Bode,” he said, gingerly touching a large purple splotch of bruise splashed over his jaw. He hadn’t said how that had happened, but the way he and Rima had glanced at one another when Eric asked made Emma wonder. “My bruises feel pretty real,” Casey said as he flexed the swollen, split knuckles of his right hand.

“And see, that’s just wrong.” Bode struck another match. “The kid’s all beat up. Pain and getting hurt and dying kind of go against this whole we’re outta some book shit.”

“Not just some book.” Emma pulled Echo Rats from the McDermott novels she’d taken from the library that had just … appeared? Been behind that slit-door all along? Or was the library made as this family room had been: when House decided she needed it? The slit-door was also gone, replaced by an ordinary wooden door with an ordinary knob. Inside was a normal, ordinary library with floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books. Only one detail in that room gave her pause: a copy of some painting of Dickens, mounted next to shelves crammed with the writer’s works. The only picture in House she’d seen so far, the painting featured Dickens, napping, in his library. Floating all around were various characters from his novels and stories, but the piece looked unfinished. Only a portion had any color: Dickens, a few of the characters, some of the books. The rest was nothing more than an outline, a compositional rendering. She really recognized only one character hovering above Dickens’s right hand, because it was one of the most famous: Little Nell on her deathbed.

So what … this was a clue? No Mirror in the background that she could see. Perhaps one of Dickens’s own books was important? Or a character? Well, hell if she knew, and they had bigger problems.

But she’d also noticed something else: no radio in that library, or anywhere. In fact, she hadn’t heard that scratchy static-filled broadcast about murders since she’d pulled the others into House. Didn’t know what to think about that either, or why that broadcast, so constant across situations—whether it was with Lily or in House, or way back, down cellar—had dogged her in the first place.

“This book,” she said now, holding up the novel. Two red eyes, with slits for pupils, stared out from the center of a pitch-black cover. “Your story.”

“We don’t know that,” Bode snorted. “So the guy used my name. Big deal. Don’t tell me you never saw your name in a book and didn’t get a little weirded out.”

She knew what Bode was saying. The effect was jarring, a mental hitch, like blundering over an exposed root. The paper she’d written for the Jane Austen unit in English last year was torture, like analyzing a weird, alien twin. “This is different, Bode. You must feel it, even if you don’t want to believe it. What other explanation is there? And don’t say drugs or you’re drunk or something. This would have to be the most detailed bad trip of all time, and you know it.”

“I don’t know anything, and neither do you. You’re spouting theories.” Bode’s jaw set. “Point is I’m me, right here, flesh and blood. You read that book? Is this crazy valley in there, or you guys? This house?”

“I don’t know. We didn’t go over Echo Rats in class. But I doubt we’re in there, or this situation. The jacket says the novel takes place in Vietnam and Wyoming.”

“Where you said you and Chad were this morning,” Eric put in.

“And still could be now,” Bode said.

“No,” Lizzie said. “We’re not anywhere, really, or any-when.”

“What does that mean, Lizzie?” Rima asked, at the same time that Bode rolled his eyes and drawled, “Oh yeah, that’s so clear.”

God, the way certain things kept repeating and echoing was starting to weird her out. “What about this?” Flipping the book over, Emma quickly jumped her gaze from that black-and-white photo to the blurb. She doubted any scaly-armed monsters would suddenly corkscrew free, but you couldn’t be too careful. “The blurb says 1967, Vietnam, Seventh Cav, C company, black echoes …”

“Black echoes?” Casey asked.

“VC tunnels.” When Casey looked blank, Bode amplified. “Vietcong?”

“Who?”

“Guerrilla force for the North Vietnamese Army,” Eric said. “It’s, like, ancient history.”

“Not to me. Echo Sector’s lousy with tunnels. Blacker than pitch,” Bode said. “Just like on the cover.”

“You crawl through enemy tunnels?” Casey said. “In the dark?”

“Get shot if you use a flashlight.”

Flashlights. Getting shot. Emma felt that queer mental jolt. That’s exactly what I was thinking earlier. What does that mean? That we’re really all linked because of Lizzie?

“Yeah, tunnel rats,” Eric said. “I read about you guys.”

“That’s us. Dropping into a black echo’s the only way to kill Charlie before he kills us.” Bode’s tone was matter-of-fact. “Look, for the sake of argument, let’s say you’re right. Well, why can’t that book be from one of those … those universe things? Like it came here to us? Know what I’m saying?”

“Well—” Emma began, and stopped. That all these books existed in an alternative timeline had never occurred to her.

“Ah. Ah.” With a wiggle of his eyebrows, Bode used a thumbnail to scratch a flame from another match. “See? Gotcha.”

“It’s not a contest,” she said, although she felt as if she’d lost a point. Why hadn’t she considered that? Bode was absolutely …

“He’s right.” When she turned to look, Eric shrugged. “Well, he is. Why can’t someone have written about us in one timeline and painted us onto canvases in another, or … I don’t know … made us into toys, or something? I can buy multiverses. The theory’s there. I’ve read enough science fiction. For all we know, this could be a simulation, too, right? Like The Matrix?”

Yet one more echo, but Eric, she almost understood. Didn’t like that she did either. “Yes, but …”

“So leaving aside the how of getting here for a second, Lizzie finds and then brings us”—Eric looked over to Lizzie—“through these, ah, Dark Passages?”

“No, Eric, I told you,” Lizzie said. “Except for Emma, you guys came from book-worlds. The Dark Passages are what’s between the Nows.”

“See?” Bode threw up his hands. “This is exactly what I’m saying. The Dark Passages are between Nows, and what’s between Nows are the Dark Passages … That’s like saying something’s a cat because it’s a cat, but it doesn’t tell you anything about what a cat really is.”

“Tautology,” Eric said, then waved that away. To Emma: “My point is that there are a lot of possibilities, but let’s just go with what you’re proposing, okay? In that case, what Bode said could be true. Why couldn’t we be ideas in one alternative universe or timeline and real people in another?”

“Like the soldiers in one of Tony’s comics.” At Eric’s puzzled look, Casey said, “They were in his car. There was this Twisted Tales about soldiers fighting giant rats. The soldiers turn out to be toys, but they think they’re real.” When Bode opened his mouth, Case said, “Yes, I know. You’re real. I got that, but get this. The comic was new, like he’d just pulled it off the rack, only the date was April. Last time I looked, it was December.”

“So? Big deal.” Bode blew a raspberry. “It’s a real nice drugstore. They take good care of their merchandise. April was only a couple months ago.”

“Only if this is 1983. I read the date.” Casey frowned. “Come to think of it, Tony’s car was really old, and he played cassette tapes, not CDs.”

“CDs?” Bode asked.

“A compact disc, for digital data … You can put music … Never mind.” Emma waved the explanation away. “It’s not important. What he’s saying is, Tony was from the past.” She paused. “Well, okay, our past, same as you.”

“Or you’re all from my future.”

“Whatever. I’m not sold we’re in a specific time,” Eric said.

“He’s right. You’re not.” Lizzie laid her cheek on her knees with a sigh. “You’re outside of a regular Now. You know, where there are things you guys call today and tomorrow and next week.” It might have been the dance of shadow from the fire, but for a brief moment, the little girl’s eyes did their odd glimmering shift again. Emma couldn’t tell if Lizzie was only tired, or depressed. Or—here was a crazy thought—bored and a little exasperated, as if she’d seen this play a thousand times before and was simply waiting for the characters of this particular drama to get it out of their systems, think it through, and catch up already.

“There’s just this special forever-Now,” Lizzie said. “And it’s like this big house, with a lot of rooms and no hallways in between.”

“Separate … rooms?” Rima said. “You mean, where things happen depending on who’s there?”

Lizzie nodded. “That’s the way it is here because of all the thought-magic. And it’s always night and really cold.”

“Hell is cold,” Eric muttered, and when Bode gave him a look, he added: “Dante. We read Inferno in school. The ninth circle of hell is a frozen lake.”

“I remember that,” Emma said. “Lucifer’s trapped in ice up to his waist.”

“And shrouded in a thick fog.” After a pause, Rima continued, faintly, “We read it, too.”

“Dad liked that book,” Lizzie said. “Not the God stuff, but he and Mom said the ice was close to what it was like in a Peculiar: really, really, really cold.”

“Yeah, that explains a lot.” Grunting, Bode scraped another match to life. “Thought-magic.”

“Bode, all she’s talking about is energy,” Eric said. “You took high school science, right? Heat is energy. Those matches? Friction on red phosphorus is enough to turn it, chemically, into white phosphorus, which ignites in air and releases heat. Take away heat, you bleed energy, which means that things cool down. You ever seen ice?”

“Of course. So?”

“Ice is solid because it’s been cooled,” Casey said. “Energy’s been taken away. Add energy, heat, the molecules speed up and ice melts. It becomes liquid. Heat it enough, it turns to steam. It just depends on how much energy you add. If I know that much science, Bode, so do you. I think what Lizzie’s saying is that the inside of a … a Peculiar? This kind of special container? It’s cold for a reason.”

“That’s right. All the thought-magic slows down. It still does things, but it can’t get out.” Lizzie looked at Rima. “Like what happened to you guys. I know that was really bad, but not as terrible as it could’ve been. In a Peculiar, the thought-magic’s not as strong.”

Oh my God. Emma felt a flutter, like the wings of a trapped butterfly, in her throat. She’d spouted the same thing to Kramer. Drop the temperature enough … She’s saying that a Peculiar creates the conditions for a Bose-Einstein condensate.

“So after Mom blew up the barn and everything,” Lizzie said, “all that thought-magic from the whisper-man and my dad and all those Peculiars, which were full of extra thought-magic left over from your book-worlds—”

“Stop, stop,” Bode said. “What do you mean, extra?”

“I mean … extra. Leftovers. Like, you know, you made too much macaroni and cheese.” When Bode looked blank, Lizzie said, impatiently, “Well, you don’t just leave leftovers out on the table or the floor, right? You put leftovers away, into something. Mom did the same thing with the thought-magic that Dad used to pull stories onto White Space. She had to, or the stories wouldn’t stay on the page. So all that extra thought-magic in the Peculiars got loose and tangled up, all mixed together, with my dad and the whisper-man and became, you know, the fog.”

There was a moment’s silence. Emma didn’t know about the others, but her head was crammed with so many questions, she wasn’t sure in which order to ask or even think them. Having skimmed shelves of McDermott novels, she knew this much: there was a Bode novel, a Rima book. Now Done Darkness was Tony’s story, and she’d counted twenty-two other novels. If he’d kept it up, McDermott might be into Stephen King territory by now.

But in all of that, there wasn’t one completed book about—

“Why isn’t there a book about us?” Casey suddenly asked. “We’re here, but there’s no Eric book, no Casey book.”

“Terrific.” Bode snorted. “Which means you guys are the only real people?”

“I told you, I don’t know anything about that,” Lizzie said.

“There’s no Emma book either,” Eric said.

“Not exactly,” Emma said, and gestured at the parchment she’d brought down from Lizzie’s room. She’d half-expected that red spidery scrawl to have disappeared, but it hadn’t: One June afternoon …

“I think Emma’s book was the one my dad was working on when Mom … when she … you know.” The little girl pressed the heel of a hand to her pooling eyes. “There was a whole bunch of thought-magic spilling out all over the place, and that’s when Emma got loose.”

“ ‘One June afternoon,’ ” Eric read, and lifted his eyes to hers. “It says that you went down cellar for a book. Did that happen?” When she nodded, he said, “Can you tell us what happened next? Do you remember?”

Oh yeah, in spades. The family room seemed suddenly much too hot. She didn’t want to talk about this, and not only because it had scared her silly. Talking would make it real, because she would be putting words to an experience that felt like the distant cousin to what was happening to them now. And everything—my blinks, my blackouts—all that started where McDermott’s fragment ends.

She cleared her throat. “Like it says, I was a kid. I decided to forget it, try never to think about it. Most of the time, it’s muddy, like a dream. But what the parchment says is right. It was June, a week after I turned twelve,” she said, “when I went down cellar to look for a book.”

EMMA Down Cellar

THE FIRST THING she notices down cellar is the icy tongue of a draft licking her ankles.

Well, that’s weird. Emma frowns. The cellar’s got two rooms. The first has nothing very interesting: a boiler, a washer and dryer. But this second room is like a cave filled with treasure, chockablock with boxes and shelves and heaps of novels, including a special glassed-in cabinet of first-edition Dickens books Jasper keeps here, down cellar, where the temperature is always cool and the air kept very dry. There are also old comic books and stacks of science fiction, as well as tomes on science and history and art. There’s a massive antique rolltop desk, too, locked up tight. She’s run her hands over that thing a dozen times, searching for a hidden catch or knob that might release the rolltop. Her jewelry box has a secret compartment, so maybe there’s some über-secret way of getting into the desk, too, but she finds nothing. Picking the lock also turns out to be way harder than in the movies, and she’s finally let it be. Probably Jasper doesn’t remember the desk’s even here, hunkered in the dark.

But the draft is really strange. It doesn’t belong at all. Inching on hands and knees, she follows the chill behind a tower of boxes butted against the south wall. There, etched on the wall and along the floor, is a perfect two-foot square. Instead of the gray wash used on the rest of the cellar’s cinderblock, however, this square is a blinding, featureless, bone-bright white.

She rocks back on her heels, the better to study that blank. There is no doubt in her mind that Jasper has slathered the same paint here that he does on his canvases, but why? Is something beneath this? A painting on the cinderblock? She wouldn’t put it past him. But the idea doesn’t feel quite right.

Then her eyes catch a slight wink of brass, and she sees a pull-ring on the right, about midway down. The pull-ring is Emma-sized, just right for her hand. Had that been there a moment ago? She isn’t sure. But there’s no doubt now.

Wow. A little mouse of excitement scurries up her spine. A door? Another room? She laces her fingers through the pull-ring—and hesitates. She’s not an idiot. There might be spiders, or bats, or dead things with gooshy innards waiting in the dark. Maybe Jasper’s hidden this door for a good reason. Nightmares live under the white paint on his canvases, for heaven’s sake.

Still, she can’t resist, and pulls. At first, nothing happens, and she is about to pull harder when small flakes of white paint begin to snow in a fine flurry to the cool concrete. She feels the door gasp and shudder, as if suddenly waking from a deep sleep. Then the door gives; it yawwwns open on a silent, rushing exhalation of pent-up breath, the way she porpoises out of Superior’s blue-black waters on a hot summer’s day.

But behind the door, there is nothing. It is Pitch. Black. Just an inky square. The darkness almost doesn’t look real. She can’t see an inch into all that nothingness, and it smells funny: like when she scraped both her knees bloody the day she took a header off her bike.

Light. She races back upstairs, then pulls up and tiptoes into the front parlor. In the kitchen, the radio is yammering to itself, the reporter excitedly talking about police and victims and murder, but she doesn’t care. Jasper is gone; probably sketching but mainly boozing before heading off to make arrangements for a kayak trip they’ll take in a week’s time to Devils Island. Sal’s taken the truck to town for groceries. So Emma’s safe, at least for the rest of the afternoon. Perfect. Stretching up on her toes, she filches a pack of matches from the fireplace mantel. In the kitchen pantry, she finds a plastic bag of used candles—Sal’s such a cheapskate—and fishes out three blue stubs left over from her and Jasper’s birthday cakes the week before.

Back downstairs again, lickety-split. She strikes a match: psssttt! The match head splutters to life, and then she raises her tiny torch to the dark. The blackness does not give. Inky shadows flee from her, splaying over the cement behind, but no light penetrates this third room. At. All.

Okay, that’s even stranger. That’s not the way light works. Or darkness, for that matter: if the room is empty, then nothing should prevent light from penetrating.

She reaches a tentative palm, like a mime tracing an invisible door, and instantly snatches it back. Whoa, cold. She haahs warm air onto her fingers, shaking her hand until the feeling needles back in darts and tingles. What she’s felt is so frigid it burns—and hard, like a pane of black glass. Yet in that brief contact she felt the darkness, well … seem to give a teeny, tiny bit: as if the glass, smooth as a sheet of quartz crystal, morphed to a dense yet pliable cellophane.

But there is something else: a sound, scratchy with distance, seeping from that gloaming. What is that? She cocks her head, straining to tease out the components. The sound is as crackly as the weather band radio Jasper listens to whenever there’s a big blow and Superior gets wild. So someone left on a radio? Like Sal has done upstairs? That doesn’t make any sense, not even for Jasper. Probably just hearing a weird echo. And yet there is something making noise in there. No matter how hard she tries to pull the sound to her, however, all she gets are static-filled whispers, like the hiss of sand spun into a dust devil.

Whoa, wait just a second. The hairs on her neck suddenly spike with alarm as another thought occurs to her. What if there’s someone living under Jasper’s house? That stuff can happen. Over on the mainland, down around Ashland, bums hole up in broken-down shacks all the time. The news says so.

I shouldn’t go in there, she thinks. What if there are snakes? Or rats? Or something worse, like monsters and shadows, in the dark? That could be. Maybe that’s why Jasper’s walled this up, so what’s inside can’t get out.

Or what if the black is the monster?

“That’s just silly,” she says. “It’s your imagination. It’s like when you listen to a seashell and hear the ocean. You’re listening to air, that’s all.”

Candle in one hand, she reaches for the blackness, wincing as her fingers meet that icy, glassy darkness, but forcing herself not to flinch back—and this time, there’s a difference. This time, she hears the faintest, tiniest click. Like the snap of a light switch or the sound her little jewelry box makes when she reaches underneath and presses the little brass nib and—snick-click—the hidden compartment springs open.

Oh! Her heart does a spastic little flip. Now the glassy black membrane seems too thin and gives easily, and she watches as her hand and the candle slide into the dark.

Almost instantly, the flame dies and goes out.

What? Maybe the draft blew it out. But when she pulls out the candle, the yellow arrow of its flame still flickers. Huh? She eases the candle in again, and right away, the flame disappears—and so, she notices now, does her hand. Yet she still feels molten candle wax spilling onto her fingers. The sensation is distant, the wax’s warmth leeching away quickly, as if sucked into a deep well. No pain, though. Just cold and—

And then, something inside hooks her wrist and tugs.

“Oh!” Emma ekes out a tiny, wheezing cry. “No!” She tries taking her hand back, but this something only tugs harder. From deep inside, the whispers suddenly swell, growing louder and more excited, the sound like the scritch-scratch of rats scurrying over glass. Stifling a shriek, she plants her feet on either side of the door and pulls. The darkness gives like grudging, soft taffy and then lets go with a sensation like the snap of a rubber band: ka-twannnggg!

She tumbles back, gasping. Her hand is still attached, all fingers accounted for, but the tips are white and icy. The candle’s dead. A thin streamer of smoke curls from the blackened wick—and the molten wax has frozen.

There really is something—someone—in there. She sprawls, unmoving, paralyzed with fear, her heart going thumpity-thumpity-thumpity-thump in her chest. She felt a hand. There were fingers, and she heard it … them. They almost got her.

And what about the candle? Her hand? Once she pierced that darkness, she hadn’t been able to see either. She’s paid attention in science: no light + brain-freeze cold = … outer space? Or a really cold vacuum? But neither makes sense. There can’t be a black space-hole under Jasper’s house.

Then her mind jumps: Matchi-Manitou, in his deep dark cave. The Ojibwe say there’s a big evil demon in a huge black cave under Devil’s Island. Jasper goes over there all the time. He paints nightmares and then covers them up. He boozes and babbles about White Space and broken Nows and Dark Passages.

So maybe this is one of them, a Dark Passage, and this is like Devils Island. Her lungs are going so fast she’s dizzy. Catch a clue, Emma. You live in a cottage overlooking Devil’s Cauldron. So is this a tunnel that connects the two? Is this the Dark Passages Jasper’s so scared of? No wonder Jasper’s covered this over. He doesn’t want whatever’s in there getting out. Or me or anyone going in. Something grabbed me. Something’s whispering. If Matchi-Manitou had gotten a really good grab and—bam!—she’d gotten hooked and reeled in like a salmon, what then? Would she have been able to see at all? Maybe she wouldn’t want to. She’d be dinner. Matchi-Manitou would drink her blood and crunch her bones and eat her up, munch-munch-munch. Even if she’d managed to get away, where would she be? What if she ended up somewhere—some when—else?

You are not going to think about this anymore. The sweat pops on her forehead as she levers that door, really throws her weight against it. You are going to forget all about this. Stick your fingers in your ears and la-la-la-la all the way back upstairs.

The door is pissed. Doesn’t want to close at all, nosirreebob. She can feel it protesting, or maybe that’s only what lives inside the dark exerting some force to keep her from closing it off again. From deep within, the whispers seethe, but there are so many she can’t make out the words, which she thinks is probably good. She doesn’t hear them; she’s not listening, la-la-la-la …

Finally, grudgingly, the door grumbles shut. She doesn’t dare look at that white blank too long either. If she does, she might see the ring again, and then the urge to pull open the door and push against the dark would be too strong.

Nope, no way, not going there. She works fast, wedging all those boxes tight-tight-tight against the white cinderblock. She covers that door and blots it from view. Hours later, when Jasper stumps back in, reeking of fish slime, bourbon, and the turp he uses to clean his brushes, she’s at the kitchen table, an untouched glass of chocolate milk she doesn’t want in her hands, as the radio yammers on and on about death and murder and blood, so much blood. Lost in a boozy fog, Jasper doesn’t spare her a glance, and she’s not telling. In fact, she decides right then and there not to …

EMMA All Me

“… THINK ABOUT IT,” she said. “Until today I was doing a pretty good job, too. But some of what’s happened echoes and circles back to that, even down to that little click. I heard the same thing at the library door.” And in the vision of that insane asylum, come to think of it, when she’d locked the door in that iron grille.

“What if what you found was a force field put up by some machine?” Eric asked. “Like a … a device or tool or something?”

“That’s what Dad called the Mirror,” Lizzie said. “Same with the panops and Sign of Sure. He said they were all tools from a long time ago and another Now. I never thought of it before, but the time I saw my dad at the Mirror? When he … when he c-cut himself?” She knuckled her eyes, but Emma saw the tears starting again. “When he t-touched the M-Mirror, it made a c-click.”

“But I didn’t cut myself,” Emma said. “It just happened.” Then thought: Force field or barrier might be right, too. I keep thinking about where the barriers are thinnest. What would happen if those went away or sprang a leak?

“Might work like a fingerprint ID for a computer,” Eric said.

“You’re saying the machine recognized me?”

“It kind of fits, doesn’t it? Whatever was down cellar let you … well, log on.”

“What?” Bode asked. “What a log got to do with anything? A log’s just wood.”

“It’s just another word for a special kind of key,” Casey said. “Only this key unlocks a machine.”

Key. Emma felt the word hook her attention. Lizzie said … or was it her dad … one of them mentioned a key. But hadn’t Frank McDermott also said that this key was something they’d read? Yes, he said manuscript, and they found it in London.

“But log on to a machine that can do what?” Rima asked. “Draw out energy that you can use to make a book? Or glass?”

“Or anything.” Eric ran a hand over the hard edge of the coffee table. “Even something as simple as this. In the real world, the one we all think of as real, the only reason this wood table stays a table is because the energy required for wood and iron to hold their shapes is exactly right—for that reality. Add more energy—say, touch a match, start a fire—you destroy the wood’s ability to hold that shape. You’ve added too much energy to the system and initiated a different reaction.”

“Like the phase transition of ice to water, or water to steam,” Emma said. “To fog.”

Eric nodded. “So I guess this … this Dark Passages energy stays put in our reality only if you use a certain amount and no more.”

“You know … what happened out on the snow—those creatures just appearing, the church, Tania?” Sliding a copy of Whispers from the pile of books, Rima studied the cover art: the portrait of a girl with wild, staring eyes as black as oil and a frill of spider’s legs blooming from her mouth. “If I let myself just accept the idea for a second that my story’s already been written and the fog is energy waiting to be used and molded and fixed … it kind of explains a lot.”

Bode barked a laugh. “How?”

“Look, outside this house, there’s fog. Call it thought-magic, call it energy … whatever. Casey and I started out caught in a whole lot of nothing. Just … just fog,” she said, although from the look she shot Casey, Emma almost thought she had been about to say something else. “But then I made things out of the fog because of who I am,” Rima continued, skimming a light finger over the portrait’s forehead as if trying to smooth back the girl’s bangs. “I made Tania, and I did it because Lizzie’s dad had already written it all out for me. I made …” She offered up the book with a slight shrug. “I made the story that I came from, or it built itself around me.”

“But then why did it get so crazy?” Bode asked. “The way everything fell apart on the snow like that? Is that in the book?”

Lizzie sighed. “I told you. The book-world Now that she made broke. I think there were too many of you guys all together for too long on the White Space of the wrong story. Dad said that whenever a lot of book-people end up on the same White Space, they break it, because the stories can only go in certain directions. It would be like everyone all piling into a car and wanting to go his own way. But you’ve only got the one car,” Lizzie said, like a kid regurgitating a lesson she’s gone over so many times she could recite it in her sleep. “He said the wrong characters are like, you know, the things that give you a cold.”

“You mean viruses? An infection?” Eric asked.

“It actually makes sense,” Rima said. “That world was going pretty strong until you and Bode and Chad showed up and brought the … the energy of your stories. Like what you just said about adding energy to ice or wood? Only it was the world I was building from my story that broke.”

“So where’d Chad go?” Bode said. “He’s dead, right?”

“No. Well, sort of,” Lizzie said. “He’s just gone from here, this whole Now. He’s back where he belongs, in his book-world.”

“But Tony …” Casey nudged out Now Done Darkness, a book whose cover art—a bulbous, slimy-looking monster, with more tentacles than an anemone and what seemed a million eye stalks, chewing its way out of a woman’s stomach—made Emma actually ill. “We saw him die. So, is he really dead? Does he die in his book?”

“No,” Lizzie said. “I’ve visited that book-world a bunch of times.”

“But he’s dead,” Casey repeated.

“Yeah, kind of,” Lizzie said. “He got killed here, so he’s gone from here. But he’s not dead dead. Just who he was here is gone.”

“What?” Casey said, but Rima interrupted, “I think there’s a difference between dead and gone. I know what we saw, but …” Rima’s fingers crept to a crocheted scarf wound in a loose cowl around her neck. “His whisper, in the scarf? And his mother’s? They just disappeared, as if they’d been erased, and that never happens. Taylor, for example.” Rima stroked an arm of her ratty parka. “She’s still here. Even when her whisper finally fades, there’ll still be the tiniest trace, like a watermark. That makes sense because she’s written into my story already. But there’s nothing in this scarf. Tony isn’t tangled up in my book, and if he was never a person but just the idea of one—the energy it takes to make a person come to life on a page—maybe that’s why. It’s like his chapter closed. Tony was never supposed to be here permanently.” Rima nodded at Now Done Darkness. “That’s the version of Tony we met, and he belongs there.”

Lizzie’s mouth worked. “I just said that.”

“But then how come he showed up to give Rima a ride?” Bode said. “That was still her … what? Book-world or something? And she and I met at the rest stop.”

“That’s because I was starting to pull you guys all together,” Lizzie said. “It’s hard, and I sometimes drop you where I don’t mean to. Things would’ve fallen apart if I hadn’t separated you all again. Right after that, all of you … you know, you think you drove here, but really, I dropped you into this Now.”

“How do you do that?” Casey asked, as Eric said, “So can you get Tony again?”

“No, I can’t,” Lizzie said, choosing Eric’s question. “Once you die in this Now, you can’t come back here. You can be in other Nows, just not this one, or any Now where you get killed.”

“Wait a minute.” Bode frowned. “So let me get this straight. Tony’s alive. So are Chad and Emma’s friend?”

“Yes, Chad is in his book-world and”—the little girl waved a hand through the air—“other Nows, but only one Chad is allowed in a Now, no matter if it’s a book-world or, like, you know,” Lizzie said, “a regular Now.”

So this wasn’t like The Matrix. Frowning, Emma worried the inside of her lip. Which would make sense, because the film was about a simulation: a Neo-avatar slotting into a computer program. In a regular Now—call it an alternative timeline—if she died, she was gone from that timeline, period. That didn’t mean there weren’t a lot of other Emmas and Bodes and Erics and on and on, like an infinite number of Xeroxed copies. But which was the original?

“Why do you call them that?” Bode frowned down at Lizzie. “Nows. I don’t get that.”

“Gosh, you guys … You’re thinking in straight lines too much. Look. Here’s the difference.” Sweeping up Echo Rats, she cracked open the covers and jabbed a page. “That’s a book-world Now.” She flipped two-thirds of the way through. “Here’s another Now.” She turned the page. “This is another book-world Now,” she said, stabbing the left-hand page and then the facing page, “and that’s another.” She riffled the pages in a fan. “All of these, the pages, they’re all book-world Nows. There’s no yesterday in a book-world. There’s no tomorrow. There is only the page where you start reading, and you can skip around back and forth and start wherever you want. Do you get it? You can read a book from what you think is the beginning to the end—go on, follow all the stupid numbers—and then start all over again, or in the middle; it doesn’t matter. You can decide where the beginning is, because the book-world is the book-world. It never changes. That’s not the same as a Now where there’s Christmas and stuff and people get older and things like that, but there are lots and lots of different Nows and you can visit them by going through the Dark Passages.”

“To visit different timelines,” Eric said, “or alternative universes.”

“Fine, whatever.” Sudden tears pooled in Lizzie’s eyes as her lower lip quivered. “What’s so hard about this?” Lizzie hurled Now Done Darkness across the room, the book doing an awkward cartwheel to crash against a wall. “For book-people who are all me, you’re so stupid!”

After a moment, Bode said, “All me? Say what?”

EMMA Tangled

1

THE CRAZY QUILT was a rainbow riot: scraps from every bit of clothing Lizzie had ever worn, decorated not only with the Sign of Sure in its web but very special glass figures and alphabet beads Meredith McDermott had used to spell out Lizzie’s full name:

ELIZABETH LINDSAY MCDERMOTT

These same beads had been rearranged to form other names, too, and in various combinations:

There were more names, too: EARL and ANITA, LILY, even MARIANE. Emma picked out SAL waaaay off in one corner of a sliver of black velvet. There were still many others she didn’t know: BETTE. ZANE. DOYLE. BATTLE. All characters who existed in other book-worlds but had no part in her story.

But if I’m writing my own, and part of me is tangled up with Lizzie … Emma’s eyes crept back to the glass beads that spelled out ERIC. I can only imagine so far, and no further? No, no, wait a second, wait just a minute … that couldn’t be true. Her gaze swept across the quilt, and then she felt the air ease from her throat. Okay, no KRAMER. No JASPER either, not that she could see right away. The quilt was about half the size and length of a twin bed, and it would take time to pick over and parse out everything. But she knew on a deep, gut level: Jasper just wouldn’t be there.

There’s no J in Lizzie’s name, and she said I made Kramer myself. So, did I also make Jasper? That thought promoted another, something that had bothered her but which, at the time, she couldn’t afford to dwell on because she’d been running for her life: In that insane asylum, Kramer called him John, like that was Jasper’s first … She felt her heart kick start in her throat. No, no, that can’t be right.

At her sudden intake of breath, Eric threw her a small frown, but she only shook her head, not trusting in her voice. And I don’t even want to know what this means. Because she had finally put something together, a puzzle over which her mind must’ve been working, like a computer laboring, quietly, toward a solution at once inescapable and irrefutable.

2

IT WENT LIKE this.

Jasper was obsessed with a lot of things: the Dark Passages and horrific nightmarish creatures and Nows—and Dickens. So Emma knew a fair amount about the writer, including this: sometime in the mid-1860s, Dickens, along with his mistress and her mother, was in a catastrophic train accident that should’ve killed him. Of the train’s seven first-class carriages, Dickens’ car was the only one not to plunge from a viaduct and into a river at Staplehurst in Kent. For hours after the accident, Dickens tended the injured. Some died before his eyes.

The accident was something academics like Kramer loved to point to as the metaphor for Dickens himself: imperious, selfish, bombastic, a bit of the egomaniac whose life was going off the rails. At the time of the crash, the writer had been in the middle of Our Mutual Friend, which might have been lost if Dickens hadn’t remembered to retrieve the manuscript from his overcoat, which he’d left in the railway carriage, before boarding an emergency train to London.

Badly shaken and already in poor health, Dickens actually lost his voice for several weeks. His kids and friends said he never fully recovered, would get the shakes on any but the slowest of trains. Worse, Dickens struggled to finish Our Mutual Friend. Never at a loss, his next installment was several pages short. Either he was used up or traumatized—probably a bit of both; the guy was pretty manic to begin with—but his best writing days were behind him, the crash the beginning of the end. Our Mutual Friend bombed, and Dickens didn’t attempt another book for five long years. But when he did, he decided to try something that, for him, was pretty radical: a murder mystery. He decided on The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

But he never finished. Exhausted from grueling reading tours in the intervening years, Dickens keeled over from a stroke at his Gad’s Hill estate after a day’s work on Drood, and that was that.

She and Jasper used to try to work out the rest of the story, figure out whodunit, just for fun. So did a lot of people; several authors had taken stabs. Some literary groups and fan clubs still held Drood competitions as part of Dickens festivals.

And way, way back—early 1900s, she thought—there was even a mock trial, where a bunch of famous people, like George Bernard Shaw, got together and heard evidence about the character that Dickens hinted in a letter to his biographer, Forster, was the murderer.

She might be writing her life, yet one thing was now dead certain: if Jasper was a creation, he wasn’t hers. In fact, she now wondered why she’d never noticed this before.

Because Edwin Drood’s killer was John Jasper.

3

OKAY. HER HEART was galloping in her chest. Calm down. Think this through.

Say, for argument’s sake, that Eric was right. In this universe, she was like Jasper, a character created under very special circumstances with weird tools and constructed of a bizarre sort of energy that had gotten loose to write her own life. She—and maybe Jasper, too—was unique because certain, very special machines recognized her: the cynosure, for example, and whatever lurked in Jasper’s cellar. The Dickens Mirror might have responded to her as well, if Lizzie’s mom hadn’t destroyed it.

But why would it? Because she had too much of whatever McDermott had pulled from the Dark Passages? Meredith McDermott always sealed extra energy away in a Peculiar, a Bose-Einstein condensate that rendered the energy inert, unable to … well, get free, do damage, whatever. So the machines recognized her, one of their own, because she was unbound, unfinished, filled with just enough juice? And if the energy to make her came from the Dark Passages, did that mean these devices originally belonged to whatever lived there?

Lizzie says tangled a lot. If she followed Rima’s reasoning—that the versions of Rima and Tony and Bode she was seeing now were set because they’d come from a book-world—then Lizzie’s finding and hanging on to her, a character who was unbound, ought to be a lot harder. Unless this version of me, the one McDermott was writing, is tangled up with all the other book-worlds, as well as Lizzie, her dad, and the whisper-man. Following Lizzie’s loopy logic, that meant she had McDermott in her, too.

Just as Jasper had some of Dickens in him?

What did that mean? Could McDermott have actually known Dickens in that other London? And what about the fact that there was no KRAMER on Lizzie’s quilt? She supposed not every single character in every single McDermott novel could be modeled on or incorporate bits of Lizzie. But if you believed the academics, writers always slotted in portions of their lives into their work, whether they knew it or not. So could Kramer be a piece of—or stand-in for—something or someone else? McDermott, perhaps? His first name was Frank … no, Franklin. So that would work; all the letters you needed to make KRAMER were right there.

Following that reasoning, she ought to have pieces of all of them: Bode, Tony, Rima, Chad, and on and on. So would that same tangled-ness make it easier for the machines to recognize her? It might even explain these weird echoes—how they all tended to use the same phrases, for example.

Whoa, wait. What if she was the one making up all of them? What if she had dreamed up Lizzie? But why would she do that?

Well, Jesus, all she had to do was think about her so-called life. She’d taken that psych course. Why did any little kid dream up imaginary friends? Because she’s lonely. No one wants her. She fit the bill: cast-off, ugly, traumatized, all-around weird. Sure, Jasper pulled a save, got her fixed up, made her … well, into a normal-looking person, a girl someone might even think was halfway decent-looking. Maybe.

But had she made herself a protector—because she’d desperately needed one? John Jasper was Edwin Drood’s uncle, and his guardian. So had she heard or read the story and then somehow brought John Jasper, unbound and unfinished, to her? Conjured up these people and this situation because she wanted friends? It fit. Wasn’t she the one lusting after an imaginary guy whose story she couldn’t finish?

Wait, wait. Slow down. She could feel the heat in her cheeks. Yes, Eric was nice; he was perfect, exactly what she’d always imagined. She felt the connection, this pull. Look how he’d risked his neck to come after her and Lily. The way he looked at her made her feel … special.

But there’s Casey; don’t forget that. She gave herself a mental shake. Eric knows him. Casey’s his brother. So that clinches it right there, you nut: you can’t possibly be causing this. Stop freaking yourself out. For God’s sake, you didn’t dream up Frank McDermott or purple panops or a cynosure or a Dickens Mirror.

Had she?

4

“SEE?” LIZZIE SAID to Bode. “That’s what I mean. You’re all me, some of you more and some of you less. It’s the way Dad wrote you. Emma’s just got more of me in her than the rest of you do.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Bode said. “Putting aside the fact that, you know, I’m a guy and in the Army, and you’re just this little kid … so you filch a couple letters and spell my name. So what? Those are beads. They’re glass.”

“No. They’re Mom’s thought-magic.” Sniffing, Lizzie smoothed the quilt over the hardwood floor. “It’s like Daddy said: look hard enough and all the pieces of me—and all of you—are tangled up, right here, forever and ever.”

“No.” Bode folded his arms over his chest. “It’s bullshit. I don’t buy it. I don’t see that this proves anything. You could make my name out of … Beauregard.”

“Sorry, dude,” Eric said. “No O.”

Bode flushed an angry plum. “You know what I’m saying. C’mon, Devil Dog, why are you so ready to believe all this?”

“Because.” Eric threw up his hands. “I want to move on already. Enough emo, guys, really. Fussing about this isn’t going to change the fact that we’re stuck here and have to deal, period. The sooner we get past this, the sooner we can figure out why we’re here and then get out.”

“I can dig that,” Bode said. “But I don’t have to believe this to—”

No, I think, actually, you do. The rules here were so different, they wouldn’t get far if they couldn’t start thinking outside the box. “Bode,” Emma said, “what’s your last name?”

“What? Well, it’s …” After another moment, Bode’s face darkened. “What kind of stupid question is that?”

“Stupid”—Eric hunched a shoulder in an apologetic shrug to Emma—“but she’s right, dude. Your name tape says BODE. Is that your last name, or first?”

“It’s my name,” Bode said.

“And you know that because …?”

“Because I know it, all right?” Bode touched the name tape with a finger. “Says so right there, and it’s … you know … in my head.”

Casey glanced at Rima. “Can you spell tautology?”

“Yes.” But she wasn’t smiling. Rima’s hand had crept to her lips, and she looked as if she might be sick. “It’s not funny, Casey.”

“Yeah,” Bode said, but without a lot of muscle behind it.

“Okay, so it’s on your uniform,” Eric said. “Then it has to be your last name, right? So, what’s your first name?”

“It’s … it’s …” Bode shot Eric a thunderous look. “All right, I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m Bode, okay? That’s who I am.”

“Oh God.” Rima’s skin was pale as porcelain. “You know, until Emma asked, I didn’t realize, but … I don’t remember my last name either. I’ll bet if Tony were here, it would be the same for him, and Chad.” She looked at Eric and Casey. “What about you guys?”

Eric and Casey looked at each other, and then Casey’s mouth dropped open. “No,” he whispered. “Eric?”

“I’m sorry, Case,” Eric said, “but I don’t know either.”

Emma kept her mouth shut, grateful that no one asked her. After all, her last name, Lindsay, was right there in a scream of big block capitals. My last name is her middle name. No wonder she says we’re the closest, that I have the most of her. Come to think of it, she didn’t know Sal’s last name, or Mariane’s. Kramer was only Kramer.

Stop. Eric’s right. I could go around and around forever, but I’ve got to start with a given: I’m real. No matter what Lizzie says, I’m not words on a page. I like cherry sundaes in tulip glasses, and I save the whipped cream for last. I drink mocha Frappuccinos. I remember blue candles on birthday cakes and watching 9/11 in school and …

Her thoughts hitched up then, because she realized that she didn’t know something else very, very important. “Lizzie, when did your dad die? What year?”

“I …” Lizzie licked her lips. “I don’t remember.”

“How can you not know?” Bode asked.

Lizzie was very pale. “I just don’t, okay?”

“When’s your birthday?” Emma asked.

“That’s easy,” Lizzie said, with more than a little relief. “June ninth.”

“What?” Bode came out of his slouch. “What?”

“That’s my birthday,” Rima said, faintly. “Bode?”

He looked away, but Emma saw the small muscles ripple along his jaw. “Same day,” he said.

“Mine too.” Eric paused, and then he looked at Casey. His eyebrows folded in a slow frown. “But yours—”

“I don’t know.” Casey gave Eric a wild look. “I should know my own birthday, but I … I don’t remember!”

“What about you?” Bode said to Emma.

“Same.” Jasper and she shared the same birthday, which she’d once thought was just, well, coincidence. But now … Except for Casey, we’ve all got blue eyes, too. Lizzie’s and mine are exact matches. All of us are the same because we’re tangled up together, with Lizzie, and, through her, with her dad. All except …

“I don’t know when I was born,” Casey said again, and Rima reached for his hand. “I don’t even remember the year. But I know I’m sixteen. So what the hell, why can’t I remember?”

“What about you?” Emma said to Lizzie. “What year were you born?”

Lizzie opened her mouth, then closed it. A look of absolute bewilderment flooded into her face.

“You don’t remember,” Bode whispered. “Jesus, you don’t know.”

“Easy,” Eric said, though even he looked a little shaky. “She’s just a kid.”

“Yeah. Okay. Easy. Let’s … let’s take it …” Bode raked both hands through his dark, close-cropped hair. “Jesus, I can’t deal with this anymore, okay? What’s the bottom line? Why did you bring us here, and what the hell we got to do to get out?”

“It’s like I told Emma.” Lizzie’s cobalt eyes dropped to her hands. “I need you to get my dad. If we can, then I think he can help us.”

“What do you mean, help us?” Bode said. “We were fine until you got it in your head to put us in this mess!”

“Oh yeah,” Eric said. “Shot at by Vietcong and crawling through tunnels full of booby traps. You were doing great.”

“How can we get your dad, Lizzie?” Casey said. “He’s dead.”

“No.” Lizzie shook her head. “Not really.”

“Dead is dead,” Bode said. “Gone is gone. You just said …”

“Like I don’t know that.” Lizzie’s expression darkened with anger, and her eyes deepened to that odd and smoky sapphire glimmer Emma had trouble reading. “He’s gone from that Wisconsin,” the little girl said, “but he was tangled up in the whisper-man, and the whisper-man’s in my special Now.”

As are you, and yet … Putting aside how bizarre this all was, Emma felt this tickle of uneasiness along her neck. Lizzie could obviously leave this place long enough to grab them. Yet if she and her dad and the whisper-man and the leftover energies from every Peculiar are tangled together … She could feel her brain inching toward something else she could sense but didn’t quite know yet.

“So, your dad’s here?” When Lizzie nodded, Bode said,

“Where?”

“He’s the barn,” she said.

“The one outside?” Bode turned a frown to them before looking back at Lizzie. “So what’s the problem?”

“I can’t find him. Whenever it sees new people, it adds rooms and I get lost.”

“What? A barn can’t make more rooms.”

“Sure it can,” Lizzie said, “if it’s alive.”

ERIC What Does That Make Us?

“SO WHAT ABOUT the snowmobile?” Yanking open another cupboard, Bode stared at the shelves crammed with Kraft macaroni and cheese. “Man, I see one more Blue Box, I’m gonna pound somebody.”

“There’s a loaf in the bread box,” Eric said. He was sitting on a kitchen chair, with his right leg propped on another. Emma had eased up his bloody jeans to the knee, exposing an ugly eight-inch rip in the calf he’d snagged on that ruined guardrail … God, hours ago, from the feel of it. Days. The deep gash was ragged and crusted with old blood. Emma had dug up both a first aid kit in a downstairs bathroom and a half-bottle of antibacterial soap under the kitchen sink, which was, Eric thought, a little odd. Almost like the house knew we might need it. “Couple jars of peanut butter in the pantry.”

“Christ no,” Bode said. “Only thing peanut butter’s good for in Charlie rats is stopping you up if you got the runs.”

“Charlie rats?” Emma looked up, a crumpled gauze, spotted with bright red blood, in one hand. “What is it with you guys and rats?”

“What?” Bode looked confused. “No. It’s short for C-rations. Rations. Rats?”

“You mean, MREs?”

“No … ah … you know, MCIs.” At her blank expression, Bode said, “Meal, Combat, Individual? Canned food? It’s what the Army gives us for chow.”

“Cans?” Emma said.

“We use plastic now, and they have a different name,” Eric said.

“Really?” Bode’s eyebrows arched. “Cool. How do they taste?”

“Uh … well, you know …” He bit back a grunt as Emma touched moist, soapy gauze to the torn meat of his wound. His mangled muscles twitched as if jumping out of the way. Between the pain and the gasoline reek from his and Emma’s parkas, which they’d draped over some spare chairs, he was starting to get a little woozy, too. He cleared his throat, grimacing at the faint chemical taste on his tongue. “I’ve only had a couple, in basic, but they’re okay, I guess. Although they still put in peanut butter, so you’d probably still hate them.”

“Naw, nothing’s worse than ham and motherfu … uh, lima beans,” Bode said, with a sidelong glance at Emma. “Anything else in this place?”

“Oreos in the cookie jar and bags …” His thoughts derailed at another jab of pain. “Bags of M&Ms in the pantry,” he finished in a gasping exhale. To Emma: “Go easy. Feels like you’re scraping bone.”

“Maybe because it’s deep,” she said. “Hold still. I’ve got to clean it.”

“That’s it for food?” Bode said.

“Stop complaining. Those are all the important food grou—aaahhh.” At another knifing hack of pain, he gripped his chair seat with both hands. “Jesus.”

“Stop being such a baby,” Emma said, adding the soiled gauze, now the color of a cranberry, to a growing pile. “Just a little bit more, and then I’ll rinse it out, smear on some ointment, and bandage it up.” Tearing open another pack, she dipped the gauze into a small bowl of warm, sudsy water, then carefully spread the wound with the fingers of one hand. From where he sat, Eric saw pink muscle and a minute layer of yellow fat curds just under the skin. “You really could use some stitches, though.”

“I could do that, no sweat,” Bode said.

“No thanks. I know where you got your training.” He smeared pain-sweat from his forehead with the back of one hand. To Emma: “You seem like you know what you’re doing.”

“Mmm. Lots of practice.” The corner of her mouth quirked in a grin. “My Uncle—well, guardian—Jasper was always getting dinged up on his boat. Once he hooked himself with this big old nasty barb right here.” She pointed to her left cheek. “Just missed the eyeball. That was fun. He blamed it on the group he took out that day; said they brought bananas. If he’d known, he’d never have let them on.”

“What’s wrong with bananas?” he asked.

“Bad luck for boats.” Emma shrugged. “Don’t ask me. Anyway, he wouldn’t go into the emergency room. Made me take it out right there at the kitchen …” She suddenly straightened, the grin slipping off and a look he couldn’t decipher creasing her forehead and cutting small lines at the corners of her narrowed eyes. “At the kitchen table.” She paused. “Just like now.”

“Hey.” Leaning forward, he touched a finger to her right forearm and felt her shiver. “You okay?”

“You look kind of peaky,” Bode said.

“No, it’s …” Shaking her head, she exhaled. “I’m fine. Just a little déjà vu.”

“So what about the sled?” Bode asked, returning to his first question. “Can we use that to get out of here?”

“We’ve been over this … Hey, Case,” he said, as his brother wobbled through the kitchen door. “Where’s Rima?”

“Upstairs,” Casey said, gingerly lowering himself into a straight-back chair. “Lizzie wanted something from her room, and Rima didn’t think she should go alone.”

And you let them go? Alone? That they weren’t all in the same place where they could keep an eye on each other made him uneasy, but he kept his mouth shut. Casey had been so edgy before, not himself. The way his little brother looked now only scared him more. The hollows beneath Casey’s eyes were as livid and purple as the bruises on his neck and that huge lump on his jaw. God, had Big Earl punched Casey before, back at the cabin, and he’d just not noticed? And that thing in the snowcat choking the life out of him … Too close. A couple more seconds, Casey would’ve …

“Did I hurt you?” Emma said, suddenly looking up.

“What?” He had to work to look away from visions of Casey lying dead in that snowcat, or broken, his blood seeping between the warped boards of that damned cabin, as Big Earl bellowed.

“I asked if I hurt you,” she said, her careful eyes on his. “You jumped.”

“No, it’s okay,” he said, but he heard how rough his tone was, and swallowed. “So, Case … how you feeling?”

“Betcha still hurting,” Bode said. “You’re pretty beat up, kid.”

“I’m okay,” Casey said, though a small grunt escaped as he shifted on his chair. “Is there anything to drink?”

“Moo juice in the fridge.” Bode opened a cupboard. “Or you gotchyer Kool-Aid, gotchyer Swiss Miss, and we got water.”

Casey made a face. “That’s it?”

“Not unless you can figure a way to suck macaroni and cheese through a straw. What’ll it be, kid?”

“Hot chocolate. I can get it,” Casey said, half rising and then cautiously sliding back onto his seat as Bode waved him down. “Okay, if you’re offering. Thanks.”

“You sure you’re all right?” Eric heard the slight nagging note, but he hated this feeling of helplessness more. “Emma, is there anything like aspirin or something in the med kit?”

“Yes,” she said, giving him a long look he couldn’t read. “Some Motrin, too.”

“What’s that?” Bode asked.

“Ah … like aspirin, only not.” She looked back at Casey. “Might make you feel better.”

“No, really, guys, stop fussing. It’s not like I’m a doll … What?” Casey looked from Eric to Emma and back. “What’d I say?”

“Déjà vu all over again,” Emma said, and hunched a shoulder. “We seem to keep repeating some of the same phrases, that’s all.”

“If we’re as tangled as Lizzie says, maybe that’s what happens,” Eric said.

“Naw, come on.” Bode flapped a hand. “They’re just expressions.”

“You really believe that?” Emma said. “Still?”

Casey filled the small silence that followed. “So why were you guys talking about the sled?”

“Bode wants to bug out,” Eric said.

“Hey, Devil Dog.” Bode ran water from the tap into a kettle. “When you say it like that, sounds like I want to cut and run just when things are getting hairy.”

“Well, you do.”

“Then what would we do about Lizzie?” Casey asked. “We can’t leave her here.”

“Watch me.” Bode set the kettle on the stove, then turned on the gas. A hiss, and then a circlet of blue flame sprouted. “Now, see, that’s just wrong. Where’s the gas coming from? What’s powering the lights?”

“Everything. This place, the fog … that’s how it works here. Or just think of everything as energy, just in different forms.” Emma paused, her eyes ticking back to Eric’s again. “Even us.”

The same thought had occurred to him. Odd, how the two of them seemed to be on the same wavelength. But it was a good feeling, one he’d never had before. “I don’t see it happening any other way.”

“You know, you guys keep looking at each other like that,” Bode said, prying the plastic cap off a can of Swiss Miss, “one of you’s gonna catch fire.”

Eric saw the spots of sudden color on Emma’s cheeks as she ducked her head. “No,” she said, carefully drying his wound with clean gauze. “I was just thinking about how this must work, that’s all.”

“Uh-huh,” Bode said, spooning cocoa mix into a mug. “You keep telling yourself that.”

Eric changed the subject. “Look, Bode, if I thought we stood a chance on the sled, I’d try, but we don’t, because there are too many of us, and I’m not leaving anyone behind. Even if we could, where would we go? We might wander around for hours and be right back where we started, or lost in the snow, which would be ten times worse—if the fog even lets us get that far.”

“He’s right.” Emma squirted a thin worm of clear antibiotic ointment into Eric’s gash. “We’re not going anywhere until we finish this thing.”

“Whatever this thing is,” Bode said. “Me, I personally don’t get it. What’s so hard about getting her dad out of some creepy old barn?”

“Well,” Casey said, blowing on his hot cocoa, “obviously something. Eventually, we’re going to have to go over and find out what.”

“Aw, no.” Bode raised his hands in a warding-off gesture. “Count me out. Let the kid fight her own battles.”

“So what, you’re going to sit here, eat macaroni and cheese, and complain?” Eric said as Emma began to wrap a gauze roll around his calf. “That’s your plan?”

“For that matter, what makes you think House or the fog will let you?” Emma looked up at Bode. “House created rooms and sent me places. So we’re doing the barn, Bode. It’s only a matter of when … and who. I don’t think we can go out one at a time either. She brings people over in groups for a reason, probably trying to find the right combination.”

“Of what?” Bode asked.

“Skills? We all must have something. Rima’s got that whisper-sense going. Emma can use the memory quilt, and she pulled us here,” Eric said.

“Yeah, well …” For an instant, Bode’s eyes unfocused, flicking left before firming on Eric’s face. “I’m nothing special. What about you and the kid?”

“Beats me.” Although he thought he saw a shadow whisk through Casey’s face. “Maybe it depends on what the barn throws at us.”

“So you think the barn’s like House?” Emma said.

“Has to be.” He’d been thinking about this. “Remember what Lizzie said: not my dad’s in the barn. She said he’s the barn. It’s kind of subtle, but given your experience in this house …”

“So what?” Bode said.

Eric watched Emma think about this, then give a slow nod. “You mean that the barn was his space. It’s where her dad worked. So the barn is … him? A manifestation, a way for her to see him?” she said. “Or only a product of how she thinks about him?”

“Maybe all those things,” he said.

“Then why not just make him a person?” Casey asked.

“She might not be able to. She keeps saying tangled. Maybe that barn’s as much of her dad as the fog allows her to see.” Of course, this begged the question of just how they were supposed to untangle the guy’s, well, energy or essence or whatever.

“Huh.” Casey took a meditative sip of his cocoa, then stared into his mug. “Kind of makes you wonder what this house is. Or who.”

“It’s probably like the barn. Not one thing or person, but pieces all mixed together.”

“But with one dominant personality, maybe,” Emma said. “As scary as the rooms and visions have been, everything I saw and did was built upon what came before it. Every situation put me into another where I was given an example of what I had to do and then”—Emma seemed to test the word before she said it—“prompted to do exactly what I’d been shown. Sort of okay, here’s how and now you try. I don’t know if House was playing with, showing, or training me up until I finally got the idea of what I was here to do. Just like Lizzie said.”

“Could be all three.” He’d thought about this, too. Emma has to be part of this, somehow; the reason the rest of us are here. It was the only thing that made sense. Lizzie tried various characters in various combinations, so they must each have a part to play—but Lizzie said that Emma was more tangled with her than the rest of them. Only Emma had been shown the memory quilt. If that cynosure was a machine, it recognized Emma, and she’d used that to reach through and pull them here. This house showed Emma something very much like this Dickens Mirror.

Emma has to be the key, a focal point.

Which made him wonder: assuming Lizzie had always known Emma was more tangled than they, had Emma been here before, with others, but failed? Or maybe only they died in this place, but Lizzie somehow got Emma out? That actually might be just one more component to Emma’s strange seizures or fugues, those blinks.

She might have been here before, but when she wasn’t ready or hadn’t acquired the necessary skills. He studied Emma as she snipped paper tape to secure the gauze wrap around his leg. So what if all this—the crash, this valley, all this death—what if this has been designed for Emma, too?

Aloud, he said only, “The house might have a lot of her mom in it.”

“Or what a little kid would wish for and associate with her mom. Lizzie said Meredith died before Lizzie could finish this place.” Emma paused, then added, with a shrug, “On the other hand, no one ever found a body, so it’s a decent thought. House is the only place with light. It’s warm. There’s food.”

“So if a piece of her mom, or the idea of her, takes care of Lizzie and makes food, gives us a place to rest and be safe,” Casey asked, “what does her dad … what does the barn make?”

“Maybe what Frank McDermott made best,” Eric said.

“Books?” Bode asked.

“No.” Emma shook her head. “Monsters. Death. Things that live in the dark.”

“Hell,” Bode said after a pause, “you’re talking about a tunnel. A lot of nightmares in a black echo, and they aren’t all human.”

“For you,” Eric said, and glanced at his brother. “I’ll bet it’s a different nightmare for each of us.”

“Different characters, different books.” Emma gave them all a strange look. “I wonder if that’s why the others Lizzie brought here before failed.”

“How do you mean?” Bode asked.

“I get it.” As soon as she’d said it, Eric knew what she was driving at. “Once they hit the barn, they must meet up with their monsters.”

“Jesus.” Bode’s eyes widened. “You mean they die? Like that kid, Tony?”

“I don’t see how it can be any other way,” he said. “Otherwise, the people she’s brought before would still be here, trying to figure a way out.”

“Aw, man.” Bode hooked his hands around the collar of his BDU as if it was a ledge and he was hanging on for dear life. “Aw, man.”

“Eric, if that’s true, and we’re all … you know, his, like he’s our father”—Casey shot him an anxious look—“then what about us? What does that make us? If everything is all tangled here, doesn’t that make us a little like him, and all the monsters? And God, what does that make Liz—” Breaking off, Casey frowned up at the ceiling at the same moment that Eric heard something: sharp but short, as if cut in two.

“Did you—” Emma began as Bode said, “Hey, you hear …”

But it was Casey who moved first. “Oh God,” he said, bolting up from the table so quickly his mug overturned with a slosh. “That was Rima.”

RIMA A Safe Place

“WOW, GREAT ROOM,” Rima said, and meant it. She took in the plush carpet, pink walls, the litter of toys. “I’ve never seen a loft bed before.”

“It was my idea.” Lizzie was crouched beneath the bed, fiddling with a wood box overflowing with various miniature Ken and Barbie-like dolls clearly meant for play with that dollhouse. “I wanted a private space just like my dad, so Dad got it built for me special, same as my dollhouse.”

“It’s really nice.” Rima knelt beside the little girl. The dollhouse was a painted lady: a riot of Victorian bric-a-brac, with gabled roofs and turrets. “So, is this where you spend most of your time?” Odd. She hadn’t thought about that until now, but here was this ageless little girl stuck where time had no meaning and there was virtually no sense of place. It’s like being locked in a padded cell on a mental ward. She eyed the toys. Or trapped in a dollhouse.

“Some.” Lizzie hunched a shoulder, her attention focused on sifting through and pulling out very specific dolls that, at a glance, seemed oddly mismatched, as if they came from many different sets. “I like to play, but I’m not always here. I can leave for a little while.”

“Leave the house to come get one of us from a”—she stumbled—“a book-world.” She did believe the girl’s story and Emma’s theories, but only because arguing against what was going on didn’t change anything and she knew what she’d experienced. And I have to believe that Tony, or some version of him, is alive somewhere. If Emma and Eric were right about alternative timelines, Tony could be anywhere, even lurking in a future chapter of her own story. Casey, too: slotted into the life she knew as a boy she simply hadn’t met yet.

“Yeah,” Lizzie said. “It’s kind of hard, but I can do that. I can visit, too.”

“Visit?” She blinked. “What do you mean?”

“You know … come over and visit. To play.”

“A …” She fumbled. “Like a playdate?”

“Yeah. I play with most of you guys, but mainly Emma.” Lizzie was unwinding a miniature scarf from a girl doll’s neck, spooling and unspooling it around a finger the way a chameleon shot and then recalled its sticky tongue. “I only come when you’re asleep, though.”

“When I’m …” Her heart did a quick, surprised fillip. “Why? I mean … why when we’re asleep?” And what do you mean, we play?

“Because you guys are harder. You’re, you know … you’re set. Emma’s way easier. She and I play a lot. In a way, it’s nice when you’re set the way you are, because it makes you easier to see and find. But it can also be a bad thing.”

“How come?” She couldn’t believe she was actually having this conversation, although she wasn’t sure that while she could say the words, she understood their meanings. See us better because we’re set? “Are you saying that it’s easier to find us on the … the page? In the book-world?”

“Yeah. I mean, it’s not super easy, because for a bookperson, the book-world is the Now. It’s all you know, but you can still go a lot of places in it. Dad called them subplots and subtexts and things that happen off stage. They’re like … hidden compartments in a jewelry box or something. In a book, you can read about a book-person’s day or one hour out of a day or five minutes, and then—poof—a chapter later, or the very next page or paragraph, it’s the day before or after or next week or even two months later, a year. You could be on a different planet. But what about all the time and space in between, see? Those are the hidden, secret parts, all the good stuff between the lines nobody ever thinks about but that has to be there. Book-people can find their way there and do all kinds of things, especially when they’ve got parts of what lives in the Dark Passages in them. That’s why people liked my dad’s books so much; the book-worlds were so real they could get lost in them. Dad said the stories got under their skin and lived inside. A ton of people even wrote themselves into the book-worlds and dressed up like their favorite characters and went on and on and on, sometimes for their whole lives. Dad called it”—Lizzie screwed her face in thought—“fan fiction.”

The whole universe between the covers of a book. But parts of what lives in the Dark Passages? Did she mean the energy in the Dark Passages … whatever that was?

“But it’s also kind of bad, too,” Lizzie continued. “To grab the book-world you, I mean. It’s like you’re wearing a big old sign: I’m Rima. That makes it way easier for the others in the Dark Passages to notice you. Then they try to grab on, like catching a ride, and oh boy, you don’t want that.”

Forget words she could say: she felt like she’d stumbled into a blurry foreign film from Outer Mongolia with no subtitles. “Others? You mean like what grabbed Emma when she was a little girl?” Then she thought of something else: “Wait a second, you said you came to visit book-worlds, right? But Lizzie, you said a book-world’s not a Now. A … a timeline is a Now, an alternative universe. And the Dark Passages … you said they were big halls between Nows. There aren’t Dark Passages between you and book-worlds, right?”

“Right, only between the Nows, and they’re big, long, really dark halls,” Lizzie said, “with lots and lots of shadows and places to hide.”

Places to hide? “But Lizzie, if you can only grab book-people with some of you in them and they only know book-worlds, even the books with lots of hidden compartments … how are the book-people getting into the Dark Passages?”

“Because I take them.”

“But why? How? Don’t you need the Mirror for that?”

The little girl gave Rima a no, silly look. “I’ve never needed the Mirror to get from one Now to the next. All I have to do is think a Now, then the Sign of Sure shows me and I go and play for as long as I want. Well …” A finger of dark oil seemed to glimmer through her blue-blue eyes. “I used to be able to stay a long time. I can’t now. Like I said, I always get pulled back. It’s never long enough.”

“Oh.” She swallowed. “What lives in the Dark Passages? It’s not, ah, just energy?”

“Oh, it’s energy all right, but really bad energies, like the whisper-man. When they notice you, they try to grab and hang on so you’ll pull them through, too.”

“And that’s not good for a Now.”

“Right. Too much of their kind of energy is terrible for a Now, like an infection. It can break the Now. That’s why it’s important to play with you book-people while you’re sleeping. That way, you don’t see them, and they can’t see you very well either.”

“Why?” But she thought she understood. No science whiz, even she knew that large portions of the brain shut down with sleep.

“Because part of you, the one that says hi, I’m Rima, turns off. Even if they do manage to get their hands on you and I drop you along the way—like into a strange Now? It’s still okay because you’re asleep and everyone expects dreams to be weird. I always find you guys again because we’re tangled, so that’s okay.”

“Oh.” She was starting to feel dizzy. Emma and Eric might get this, but physics had always given her a headache. Had Lizzie just said book-world people like her could go to different Nows? She somehow takes me out of the book-world? How would that work? And God, what does go on between the lines? “So when you come to … to play … if we’re … we’re turned off, what do we do?”

“Not a lot, but that’s also because I always put most of you-you in a safe place, anyway. It would be really bad for you to wake up in another Now.”

“What?” She was startled. “What do you mean, you put me in a safe place? How can you both visit and then put me somewhere?”

“Easy.” Lizzie’s blue eyes, dark as India ink, were surprisingly calm. They were, Rima thought, very deep, as if filled with water found only at the bottom of the sea. “I can … if I trade places with the part of you that’s mostly Rima and just play with … you know … the outside.”

“The outside. You trade …” The words knotted in Rima’s throat. “Places.” She swallowed against a rising dread. Isn’t that what Emma thought happened with this girl’s father and the whisper-man? Something Emma says she saw in one of her visions? “You mean you take our place? Like a substitute?”

“No.” Lizzie’s face gathered into another you silly, and then she pinched her own left forearm and levitated that with her right hand, the way a puppeteer manipulated strings. Rima saw that Lizzie had wound that tiny doll-sized green scarf around one finger, the way you’d knot a string so as not to forget something. “I take you.”

“Take?” A slow horror spread through her chest. “You … you live inside us? But … but …” You can’t take a whole body across. Could she? Wow, she really could use Eric or Emma; this was so Star Trek. Then the idea—intuition, really, a leap—popped into her brain to spill from her mouth: “You’re not taking my body, are you? You’re taking the essence, the energy that makes me Rima. That’s what you bring to different Nows.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” Lizzie beamed. “Only I don’t take the whole you-you. I can’t. Well, I could, but then it gets too crowded and another Rima would go crazy, and that’s not fair. Really bad things happen then. I remember a couple times, when I wasn’t very good yet? Other Rimas and Emmas and stuff tried killing themselves because of all the noise in their head. Some of them even ended up in the hospital.”

“Another …” Different timelines. Alternative universes. When she put her hand to her lips, she felt the shuddering thump-thump-thump of her pulse. She’s talking about slipping part of me and herself into another, different Rima. While that Rima was asleep? No, that must be what she means by crowded, why she says the other Rima would go crazy. You’d have two minds—three, if you count Lizzie—occupying the same body.

“Anyway, it’s not for very long,” Lizzie continued in that chatterbox little-girl way, but now Rima thought she detected the hum of another lower, darker, subterranean note. “Like I said, I always get pulled back here. I visit Emma the most because she’s the closest to me. Her lives are kind of cool.”

“Lives?” she said, weakly. Other timelines. Other universes. Other Emmas.

“Yeah. Well, except for homework. I let her do most of that because she’s way smart; I just have to kind of turn off parts of her so she doesn’t wake up all the way—except sometimes when I think she needs help. Like writing her story for this class? I did that for her; she was too freaked. The rest of you guys are way harder to live inside when we play in your book-worlds, because you’re all written out already. Unless we go between the lines and into secret subtexts and stuff, we don’t stay in your book-worlds that much. Not that you’re a bad person or anything, but your book-world life is pretty ooky, Rima.” Lizzie’s too-blue eyes, tinged now with that strange smoke, fixed on hers. “Too many bad feelings, and your mom is kind of, you know, messed up.”

There was more to this, much more, but she had to get out of the room and back down to the others. “We should …” She slicked her numbed lips and tried to get up, to push herself from the floor where she’d knelt next to the little girl. Little girl, my ass, there is definitely something … something … But her legs trembled and felt as weak as water. “You know,” she said, finally planting a foot solidly to the floor, “I think we really should go downstairs …”

Her voice choked off as her eyes fell to the dollhouse—and really noticed the dolls over which Lizzie had been so engrossed for the first time.

There were six: three boys, three girls. One boy had short, muddy-brown hair; a mass of brown curls topped a second; and the third was a wispy blonde. One girl was a luxuriant copper, while the other sported a wild, unruly shock of shoulder-length honey-blonde curls. The third doll was a very light, corn-tassel blonde.

But their faces, their hands … Rima’s heart was inching up her throat. They’re not Barbie or Ken dolls. They’re porcelain. They’re glass.

The dolls’ clothes were all wrong, too. With that Victorian dollhouse, they should’ve worn crinolines and petticoats and lacy fans and velvet trousers with cummerbunds and top hats adorned with diamond stickpins. Instead, the dolls were dressed in jeans, sweaters, jackets, and …

Fatigues. Rima felt the blood drain from her cheeks, and her arms prickle with a forest of gooseflesh. Bode’s wearing olive-green fatigues. So was Chad. Tony’s hair was curly and brown. Bode’s hair is dark brown. Her eyes zeroed in on the girls. The copper color was right. She hadn’t gotten a good look at Lily, but she’d bet the girl had been a blonde. And my hair … The trembling had moved from her legs to her chest and arms … I never can get those curls to behave.

The fingers of a shiver tripped up her spine. Casey said the soldiers in the comic were toys. This wasn’t a coincidence, but still her mind insisted: No, no, don’t be stupid. It can’t be. But Lizzie had said it: I always put most of you-you in a safe place.

And then, through the swell of her horror, she realized who wasn’t there. My God, where’s—

“So, Rima.” And then she was staring into Lizzie’s eyes, or they hooked hers, because Rima could feel the grip, the dig. The beginnings of the pain, like a thousand sharp pincers biting her brain. That odd glimmer spread from Lizzie’s eyes and overflowed, rippling through the little girl’s features, which began to shimmer, to smoke. To run together. Lizzie’s cobalt eyes shifted, darkened, deepened, oiled …

Get out, Rima thought. Her mind was racing; she could hear the shriek in her bones, feel the twitch of her muscles trying to obey, but she couldn’t move. Run, Rima, run. Get out while you still can. Get out before her eyes change, before they change all the way!

“So,” Lizzie—or whatever this thing really was—said in a whispery voice from a faraway place Rima was certain she had never been, “what game should we play next?”